Why Soaps Deserve More Respect

Time Magazine

Naturally if anyone wants to be taken seriously today the last thing she’d claim is a love of soap operas. Even in this day and age, when TV critics and fans are praising their favorite cable drama as Dickensian (an adjective based around that most melodramatic of English writers), soaps, which are arguably the missing link between Dickens and cable TV, continue to be the red-headed stepchildren of pop culture. They’re a dying breed (only four air now on broadcast networks; All My Children and One Life to Live, cancelled only a few years ago, have now been reborn as webisodes on Hulu and iTunes), but the style they helped develop––serialization––is more popular than ever. 

Dating back to the 1960s since the premiere of the night time soap Peyton’s Place, prime time serials have always had a niche on TV. Throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s programs like Dallas, Knots Landing, Dynasty, and David Lynch’s whacked out take on the genre, Twin Peaks (which itself hails roots from the daytime serial Dark Shadows) followed in the footsteps of their daytime counterparts. But starting in the 1980s, hour-long dramas and sitcoms as diverse as Cheers, Hill Street Blues, Wise Guy, The X-Files, and Homicide: Life on the Street began utilizing aspects of serialization in their storytelling arcs, greatly expanding the definitions of episodic television. Yet serialized dramas didn’t really take off until HBO began airing original programming during its Sunday night schedule. Shows like Oz and The Sopranos helped change the face of night time television, proving that audiences could embrace complex narratives about anti-heroic characters (though ironically the first anti-hero[ine] that audiences really embraced was As the World Turns’ Lisa Hughes Grimaldi, a character so loved to be hated that a fan once slapped actress Eileen Fulton as she walked out of a Manhattan department store). After the critical and commercial success of The Sopranos, HBO ordered more serialized dramas like The Wire, Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Big Love, Boardwalk Empire, Treme, Luck and others. While the subject matter of HBO’s dramas are as disparate from one another as they are from soaps (with the possible exception of Big Love, which would truly have made an arresting daytime sudser with its tales of marital bed hopping and corporate and familial intrigues), their glacial-moving plot lines and multiple character story arcs are a direct influence from soaps.

Other cable and broadcast networks followed HBO’s lead with shows like Mad Men, Homeland, Downton Abbey, The Walking Dead (based on the graphic novel, a medium that has a lot in common with soaps), and Breaking Bad. But this isn’t an example of HBO influencing a genre as it is of the cable network’s borrowing from daytime and successfully broadening its critical appeal.

Yet while cable has brought respectability to serialization, the actual serials which developed the genre from the 1930s to the present, gets, like Rodney Dangerfield, no respect at all. Does it have to do with the stories---the multiple marriages, outlandish plots, the melodrama? Perhaps. But unlike most television dramas, soaps allowed a space for women’s stories to flourish. Even today, on cable dramas like Mad Men, Big Love, Boardwalk Empire and The Sopranos, where women characters are as complex as their male counterparts, the conflicts are still largely male-centered and -oriented. Not so on daytime where women and their issues were front and center. Soaps addressed the problems women faced in the latter half of the twentieth century with far more finesse and detail. Stories that dealt with love and sex, the position women faced in choosing between work and family, their ambitions, fears, and joys were the grist of many a soap story in the 1970s and 1980s. And while soaps can be accused rightfully at times of slipping in quality (soaps churn out five episodes a day for fifty-two weeks a year as compared to cable dramas’ thirteen-week yearly cycle), I can honestly say that in all the years I’ve watched them and seen their highs and lows, they’ve produced quality programming that were equal, even––dare I say it?––superior to night time dramas.

I’m not interested in dredging up the usual arguments of soaps’ artistic quality by how they have tackled social oriented stories. While true (even when night time television avoided them, soaps dared to bring up topics like rape, STDs, drug abuse, abortion, etc.), I’m less interested in that than I am in looking at how soaps deserve credit for their role in expanding television’s artistic growth. I will concede that currently soaps have surrendered to self-parody and irrelevance, but that does not diminish their historical and artistic value. 

Guiding Light, CBS, Proctor & Gamble 

In the 1970s soaps were as inspired by changing tastes as much of popular culture. Like film, daytime became grittier, more character-oriented. Soaps, like the now defunct Guiding Light, told compelling, tightly-drawn dramas around the rot that can build up in dysfunctional marriages. Few of these stories were equal to the Roger and Holly Thorpe saga.

In the winter of 1979, Roger Thorpe raped his wife Holly. The story which led to this tragic set of events is, like most soap stories, elaborately woven. Teenaged Holly Norris was obsessed with Roger Thorpe, the show’s resident anti-hero, but he had designs on other women, namely Peggy Scott, who would become his wife. Holly instead married good guy Ed Bauer, trusted doctor and son of the town’s most respected family, but Holly couldn’t put Roger entirely out of her mind. The two had an affair which resulted in the birth of their daughter, Christina, whom Holly passed off for a short time as Ed’s. When the truth of Christina’s paternity came to light, Ed divorced Holly and Holly married Roger. But their’s was not a happy union. Roger’s insecurity, in both his place in Springfield and in his marriage, led him down a treacherous path which included an affair with Ed’s kid sister and another rape, also involving Ed’s new wife, with whom Roger had shared a past. The walls began to close in on Roger as Holly, fed up with his infidelities, prepared to take their daughter and leave.

The rape scene is difficult to watch. Unlike a similar rape on General Hospital involving Luke and Laura, which the show’s writers would later revise as a seduction when the actors’ on-screen chemistry proved too hot to ignore (they’d revise it again as rape years later), Guiding Light left no doubt that what occurred between husband and wife was a horrific violation. The scene begins with Roger arriving home just as Holly was about to leave him. Surmising the situation, Roger prevents her from leaving, taking her suitcase from her and throwing it across the room, then physically threatening her as she tries to get away. The scene ends with Roger assaulting Holly. The shot lingers only long enough to show him pinning her down on the bed while she pleaded for him to stop before the scene fades.

Two things come to mind whenever I watch this scene on YouTube. First, the acting between actors Michael Zaslow and Maureen Garrett was superb. As Holly, Garrett was confident and assertive, determined to take control of her life, but as the threat of violence asserted itself, her confidence withered away until she was reduced to a frightened child. Throughout the scene, Garrett moved back and forth between both dichotomies. As she desperately attempted to reason with Roger, she lowered her voice and spoke in a slow, deliberate manner. But after Roger slapped her and threw her down on the couch, her demeanor changed. Her body stiffens and appears to fold inward as though she is anticipating more blows and her voice becomes a high-pitched whine as she begs Roger to leave her alone. The scene is all the more compelling and difficult to watch because we are watching more than just Holly’s physical violation but a spiritual and psychological one as well. Rarely, has rape ever been portrayed in a painfully truthful way. 

Zaslow, likewise, did a terrific job. His Roger Thorpe was more than a one-note monster. While his behavior was monstrous, he was also a damaged soul, a man whose ambitions and talents could never match the societal constrictions that denied him personal and professional success. As Roger berates his wife and callously asks her to compare him to his nemesis Ed Bauer in bed---“You probably wouldn’t be in such a hurry to cut out from him like you’re cutting out from my miserable life”---he comes across less as a two-dimensional villain and more of a man who knows he has reached the point of no return. His ambitions and insecurities have created a fatal mix that crushed whatever good was in him. Zaslow’s masterful performance makes it easy to sympathize with Roger. At one point, he’s barely able to get his lines out, his voice breathless and huffy. Whether this was done by design or because Zaslow himself got caught up in the scene, I can’t tell, but it does lend Roger a poignant vulnerability on the level of a tragic, Shakespearean character. Because of Zaslow, Roger became a character fans both hated and pitied.

Roger and Holly Thorpe

The production values are impressive too. Videography, by 1970s standards, were fairly minimal, with camera angles limited to close-ups and master-shots. But the rape scene set new standards for daytime. A hand-held was used for some of the scenes, the first ever for soaps, and was utilized in such a way that allowed viewers to not only step into the scene but into Holly’s point of view. In one shot, where Roger slapped his chest and asked Holly why she never looks at him the same way she looks at Ed, the audio was somewhat distorted, the image softened, disrupting the fluidity of the unobtrusive set-ups. It’s disorienting and almost surreal, capturing the surge of adrenaline people often experience during violence. Along with the score, which is both menacing and understated, the scene puts viewers in a frightening and uncompromising position, pretty daring for daytime TV. Women watching this at home didn’t have to imagine their worst fear (if they had not already gone through it before) but were experiencing it vicariously through Holly.

The scene made such a huge impact that by the time Holly had Roger charged for marital rape, another first in television history, Garrett received tons of fan mail in support. 

The rape story line was before I started watching the series, but when both Garrett and Zaslow returned to the show ten years later, their strange, neurotic and tragically painful relationship became one of my favorite story lines. While the show’s gender politics was questionable at times (the writers danced around a romantic relationship that didn’t really exist the first time around), there was no denying the chemistry of both actors and their ability to breathe life into some of the most complex characters to ever hit television.

   

Soap operas are by no means perfect and, at times, have told stories that are questionable when it comes to gender, race, and class. They’ve had their fare share of stinkers, both story- and acting-wise. And yet, there were times, more than I can relate here, in which they were delightfully subversive, broke the rules and reset them again, and reached for moments of transcendence that television would not fully embrace until both primetime and cable began churning out more challenging fare. And, while most contemporary viewers and critics turn their noses up at a medium that is sadly going the way of TV westerns, shows like Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, and Breaking Bad owe a great deal of debt to the daytime serials of the past.  

The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding by Sarah Burns: A Review

The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding by Sarah Burns. New York: Aflfred A. Knopf. 2011. 240 pp. $25.95

In 1989, Trisha Meili, an employee at Salomon Brothers in Manhattan, went out for a late night jog through Central Park. In another area of the park, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Jr., along with a loose-knit group of African American and Hispanic youths, were harassing bicyclists and joggers near a reservoir, activities that the media would later misappropriately refer to as “wilding.” Meili and the youths never crossed paths that night and yet their fates became inextricably tied together by an appalling act that would change their lives completely. In the weeks and months following that night, Meili would be dubbed by the local tabloids as “The Central Park Jogger,” the victim of a horrific rape and beating that fanned the flames in an already racially divided city. The young men were collectively referred to as “The Central Park Five,” who were charged and convicted for Meili’s attack. In 2002, DNA testing conclusively ruled out these young men as Meili’s attackers, but in 1989-1990, with DNA testing still in its infancy, their convictions rested solely on confessions that were coerced by overzealous Sex Crimes and homicide detectives and a prosecution’s office which had decided their guilt long before an investigation into the attacks even began. Sarah Burns’ The Central Park Five: A Chronicle of A City Wilding, cuts to the heart of what led to the convictions and how a city, already overburdened with crime, violence, and racism, and led by an exploitative and opportunistic news media, engaged in a modern day lynching.

The slender but thorough book chronicles the events which led up to Meili’s attacks and the arrest and conviction of the five young men. Burns centers these events within the larger scope of New York during the 1980s---the crime and violence, largely located within the city’s econonomically deprived areas, whose prevalence was exploited by the local news media that helped further cement an image of a city spinning out of control. Though Burns makes the point that crime and violence was limited among the poor, she also reveals how a sensationalistic press helped establish in the minds of many white New Yorkers that crime was far more egregious than it actually was and linked the most horrific examples with the face of black males. Racial violence and police brutality had also added an extra layer of explosive tension in the city. The racially motivated murders of Michael Griffith and Willie Turk, both of whom were attacked by a mob of white youths after wandering into the Italian enclaves of Gravesend and Howard Beach; the police-related deaths of Eleanor Bumpurs, a sixty-six year old Bronx resident who was shot twice by riot police after lunging at them with a kitchen knife; and Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist who mysteriously slipped into a coma and died while in custody; and the media cause célèbre Bernhard Goetz, who shot five black youths after they approached him for money were all indicative of a society that was disintegrating into a morass of rage and racial violence. This willingness to believe black men were guilty of crimes highlights Burns’ contention that “the media only amplified that the city’s most at-risk population was the source of all crime, that black and Latinos, especially male teenagers, were criminals---murderers, thieves, rapists, and arsonists.” By the time of Meili’s attack, racial biases and a blindside on the part of detectives and prosecutors in their failure to admit the flaws in their case made it all but certain that the Central Park Five would be charged with the attack, even with little to no evidence linking them to Meili.

Their arrests on that fateful night were merely coincidental since many were picked up for attacking and robbing male joggers and tandem bicyclists whose main route ran along the park reservoir. After Meili was found, badly beaten and near death, in another area of the park, investigators immediately zeroed in on the young men who had been arrested that night and were being held at the Central Park precinct. What happened next was incredulous. The lack of blood on the young men’s clothing, the inconsistent timeline of the attacks, and, most importantly, the confessions detectives coerced from them, which were so wildly inconsistent with each other and with even the most basic facts available---such as the clothing Meili was wearing that night and the actual vicinity of her attack---should have alerted the most seasoned investigators. Instead, the lack of evidence itself became evidence. Investigators, as Burns points out, had already decided on their guilt before evidence could even be collected. Detectives in the homicide (Meili’s condition was so bad that the doctors treating her didn’t think she’d survive the night) and Sex Crimes units were brought onto the case. Seasoned investigators take it as a given that once they think a potential suspect has been caught lying during an interview that the suspect is the “guilty party,” then move toward a tactic that employs “minimalization” and “maximalization” techniques, which is a technical way of describing the good cop/bad cop routine. Most criminal investigations often rest solely on confessions, therefore the reputations of “good police” is dependent on their ability to get confessions. However Burns reveals this is more myth than actuality. In fact, as she writes, that while detectives think “they are experts at separting truth from lies, [but] studies have shown that this is a false confidence.” Once an investigator thinks you’re guilty, all the denials, even the lack of evidence, most likely won’t sway him.

Individuals who have not had much experience with law enforcement or understand their rights as citizens will often be the most vulnerable to coercion. This is doubly so if the defendants are teens, which was the case for the Central Park Five. Out of the five who were eventually charged with the rape, Korey Wise was sixteen, old enough according to state law to be interrogated without an adult guardian (Wise was also mentally underdeveloped and had a hearing problem). However, adult guardians were hardly protective barriers for these young men, since many were as equally disadvantaged. The mother of Raymond Santana, Jr., whose family came from Puerto Rico, had a language barrier to overcome, a fact which his investigators exploited, while others had to come and go during the long duration of the interview due to work and other obligations or suffered from illness. The young men, who would later complain of being bullied and harassed by their investigators, eventually confessed to either being at the scene of the rape or accused the other teens of the actual crime, in exchange for being let go. Though investigators denied during the trial that they physically bullied the defendents or gave the young men the impression that they’d be let go if they confessed (which would have thrown the confessions and thus the case out of court if such an offer was explicitly stated), neither they nor the prosecutors could substantiate why it took hours to eke confessions from them since, as they claimed, the young men volunteered that information almost immediately. Burns explains both the interrogation techniques used by detectives and the tricks, just this side of legal, that they used to convince suspects to waive their Miranda rights with enough probing detail that it is hard to see how these teens could have stood a chance under the onslaught of skilled manipulation.

The book gets even more incredulous when the prosecution’s office, run under Linda Fairstein in the Sex Crimes unit, takes over. Elizabeth Lederer, the ADA who prosecuted, certainly gets the award for the most dogged prosecutor, especially since there were a number of times when red flag warnings were raised regarding the validity of the case. For instance, the confessions of the young men were so wildly inconsistent that Lederer had to plan her witness statements not only so some of the young men could avoid incriminating themselves on the witness stand but so that the inconsistencies wouldn’t be so blatantly obvious. And when the FBI lab conclusively ruled out the semen found on Meili’s sock did not belong to any of the charged, she still forged onward, claiming the lack of evidence was due to the fact that all five men simply did not ejaculate. Burns nails the prosecutor’s behavior: “Despite a prosecutor’s obligation to seek justice, it seems that at that moment, winning the case trumped investigating the evidence. The incriminating statements by these five teenagers were so convincing to the detectives and prosecutors that no one felt the need to question their conclusions, which had been so easy to jump to in the hours and days after the rape.” Their unwillingness to notice the cracks in their theory led them to overlook a far more obvious suspect, Matias Reyes, a serial rapist whose crime spree “took place near where Trisha Meili had been attacked, and who used strikingly similar methods.” Reyes, as it turns out, was Meili’s attacker, but this would not be known until twelve years later, when Reyes finally confessed to his involvement in that crime. By then, Reyes was already serving life for two other rapes and the murder of a young pregnant mother (there were many other attacks for which he was not convicted). Burns final conclusion on the behavior of the prosecutors and investigators is obvious: had they done their job thoroughly, Reyes might well have been caught and young lives spared from his reign of terror.

Racism, class, and fears of crime and violence certainly plagued the case from the start, but the media deserves as much of a drubbing for poisining the well. In this area Burns does not disappoint. She points out the precise language used by many of the newsprint engines to gin up the outrage. From the start, the local press and broadcast media painted the Central Park Five in terms that left no question as to their guilt, removing such journalistically, time-honored terms like “alleged” to describe the defendants’ roles in the crime. Burns correctly reveals how much of this language harkens back to a time when black men were routinely lynched for allegedly raping or having sexual relations with white women, reducing them to animalistic terms that denied their humanity. Words like “wilding” (a misused teen slang “for acting crazy” but in less than violent terms), “wild thing,” and “wolfpack” were routinely used in reference to the rape and beating. The teens themselves were described as “’bestial,’ ‘savage,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘bloodthirsty,’ ‘evil,’ and ‘mutant.’” Even the venerable New York Times, which had largely eschewed such language in its reporting, led with an editorial headline that read: “The Jogger and the Wolf Pack,” notably without the quotations marks around the most damning word. The media created an environment in which getting the facts was next to impossible. Once the trial commenced, both the press and the public were ginned for frontier justice, including arguing for a return of the death penalty in New York, nevermind the fact that the Supreme Court in the 1979 Coker v. Georgia decision, ruled that, in cases of rape, the death penalty was unconstitutional. Yet, as Burns also rightly points out, “[T]he tradition of death as a punishment for rape has historically been reserved for a particular affront: the rape of a white woman by a black man.”

Defenders of the Central Park Five do not come off any better in Burns’ account. While many within the black community supported the five defendants, their behavior within and outside the courtroom hurt the cause more than it helped. Supporters routinely harassed and heckled ADA Lederer as she left the courtroom and, in one case, the mother of one of the defendants had an outburst in court which led to her permanent banishment throughout the duration of the rest of the trial. The Amsterdam News, a member of the local black press, was less interested in the investigating the case, which would have yielded important evidence that could have exonerated the young men, and was more determined to make political points about racism and the lack of services provided to poor young men of color. Their main argument was that the violent attacks supposedly committed by these young men was the direct result of the city’s neglect toward the poor. While there is truth in such an argument, it had little bearing on the Central Park Jogger rape, since none of the teens charged had actually committed the crime and, more or less, came from rather stable homes. Unfortunately, the teens’ legal counsel were either incapable or had their own political agendas or personal ambitions to adequately defend their clients. Far too many mistakes were made and little effort was done until the last moment to poke serious holes in the prosecution’s case. Sadly, Santana, Jr., Wise, McCray, Richardson, and Salaam were convicted and wound up serving their full terms before they were fully exonerated in 2002.

The Central Park Five is a gripping cautionary tale of justice gone wrong. And while the story ends on an upbeat note for the people involved, from the former defendants to the victim, Burns does not allow for any hope that this nightmarish account is all in the past. The lessons it tells disturbingly go unlearned. As she writes, “Though New York and the country have changed---in many ways for the better---since 1989, who is to say that a rush to judgment like this one could not happen again?” The rush to believe the atrocities supposedly committed by poor blacks in the Louisiana Superdome during Hurricane Katrina by politicians and the media alike suggests that these pernicious attitudes have not gone away. The Central Park Five is an important work that quietly sets the record straight. One can only hope that this time its lessons will finally be heeded, but one cannot help but think that in far less public cases such rushes to judgment are occurring every day.